The designers at Apple have always taken an anti-clutter approach, which has always gotten on a few alpha nerds’ nerves. When the iMac debuted without floppy drives and old-school serial ports and went with just USB, it was followed by a litany of complaints until that approach became the standard. Over time, a number of “must-have” features have been disappearing from Mac laptops, including optical drives and ethernet ports, and each time, the change has been immediately followed by the gnashing of teeth, and later followed by the rest of the industry doing the same. It would appear the Jony Ive and his team have been reading The Little Prince:

And it’s likely that most of the time, you can get by. But there will come times when you’ll need to plug it into a monitor and power and an external drive or other USB thingy, and that’s when you’ll need this thing, which Apple will happy sell to you for a mere $79:

If the pattern holds, the outrage will eventually die out and other hardware vendors will follow suit. The trend towards doing everything wirelessly and the fact that our phones are now are cameras, iPods, and increasingly our primary computing devices means that for most of us, those ports that we know and love will become superfluous. Will Stabley echoes my thinking when he writes:

Take a look at the laptop you’re typing on right now. If you have more than one cable plugged into it, you’re not the typical consumer. Backup drives, printers, internet connections, and even syncing your iPhone are increasingly done wirelessly. So don’t freak out that the new MacBook only has one port. The odds are it’s been awhile since you’ve used a USB accessory anyway.

In many ways, this new MacBook is an exciting harbinger of a bright future, one teeming with interoperability and free of proprietary connectors. We’re not quite there yet, though. And until we are, it’s going to be a long, dongle-paved road.

Fine, fine. But I still have to rant: Why did the hell did this change have to render my current power supply obsolete?!

The turnaround is ahead of schedule, says BlackBerry CEO John Chen

“We are a little ahead of our two-year turnaround and strategy,” said BlackBerry CEO John Chen at a briefing outside Mobile World Congress. “The company financially is stabilizing. We made a little bit of money last quarter. We’re going to be making more money. We’re going to be generating more cash.” AT&T and Verizon are carrying BlackBerry devices again, and Chen says that the positive results from the previous quarter is a sign of things to come.

BlackBerry plan to introduce three other devices, all of which feature the physical keyboards that are their mark in trade. One of these is a curved-screen device with a slide-out physical keyboard, and will be released “as soon as it’s done,” in Chen’s own words.

There are other ways in which BlackBerry is working on making more money:

For starters, there’s a focus on software, most notably the “BlackBerry Experience”, a set of packages to improve security and communications for government and business customers, and “Work Life” which makes it possible to separate billing and communications on employee-liable devices into “work” and “personal” categories.

Patent licensing is another avenue for money-making. BlackBerry has 45,000 patents, and Chen isn’t afraid to share for a price. “I’m not a believer in holding on to your secret sauces,” he said.

Goodies from SanDisk

SanDisk have introduced a number of goodies, the most notable of which is a 200GB microSD card that boasts a 90MBs data-transfer speed. Simply put, it’s holds a lot of data, and can move it about quickly. It doesn’t come cheap, though: it’s priced at US$400 and becomes available in the second quarter.

Their new 64GB card doesn’t have as impressive an amount of storage, but it makes up for it in durability. Most flash cards are made for intermittent use, and not meant to be accessed continuously, which means that often-used video cameras such as those for car dashboards and security systems can overtax them. SanDisk’s new high-endurance cards can take this sort of use. The 64GB version will sell for $150, and a 32GB version will sell for $85.

And finally, there are the new Dual Drive and iXpand flash drives for boosting your mobile devices’ storage capabilities. The Dual Drive features 2 USB 3.0 connectors and provides 32GB of pluggable storage for your Android phone or tablet. The iXpand drive has Lightning and USB connectors for bringing an addition 128GB to your iOS device.

See us at MWC!

We’re in Barcelona to see what’s new at MWC, and to talk to people! In attendance are:

Referring to Android head Sundar Pinchai’s earlier keynote presentation, in which he talked about Google’s Loon and Titan projects, whose goals are to create balloon- and drone-based cellular networks to bring the internet to underserved people, Zuckerberg reassured carriers by saying that they, and not these projects, will actually do the job. “People like talking about that stuff because it’s sexy,” he said, “That’s at the fringe of the real work that’s going on. Ninety percent of the people in the world already live within range of the network. “Going forward the face of Internet.org needs to be the companies doing the work, laying the fiber in the ground, building the infrastructure that’s actually connecting people in the world.”

While Facebook’s free messaging apps are said to eat intro carrier revenue and be detrimental to customer-carrier relationships, Zuckerberg argues that Facebook’s continued growth and Internet.org will be good news for carriers: “The feedback from partners is not only do more people start adopting data, but people use more voice and SMS and pay for that even more. We’ve seen a lot of cases where ARPU [average revenue per user] goes up.”

Since this came out of Redmond, it’s apparent that the poster’s goal is to convince Swift developers to try out C# for building iOS apps. The interesting thing is that Microsoft is promoting Xamarin — a tool that uses its programming language but isn’t made by Microsoft — and that it’s pushing development across all platforms. That’s something we wouldn’t have seen in the Ballmer era.

While the poster is useful for its intended audience, it should also be useful for .NET developers who want to give Swift a try.

The mobile world’s attention is turning to Barcelona this week, as it’s time once again for the annual Mobile World Congress, where the world’s mobile device and wireless service vendors parade their latest wares to nearly 80,000 attendees who come from all over the world. This week, we’ll keep you up to date on the developments at MWC, so be sure to check this blog daily!

Google’s take on mobile: “We don’t just see phones, we see powerful computing devices. They are devices that connect to the cloud, which is where Google comes in.”

Google Translate on mobile. “We serve over one billion translations a day.”

Mobile, in general: “People spend more than 10 million hours on their phones a month. On Black Friday, 40% of transactions were done on mobile.”

Android, of course. 8 out of 10 phones shipped run Android, which he owes to its serving “an entire spectrum, all the way from entry level to high end.”

More than just phones: “We’re working on Android beyond phones and tablets, watches, televisions, cars. VR is going to be a hugely important area that’s using Android as its foundation.”

Extending the cloud: “There are 4 billion people in the world that don’t have access to connectivity. We want to do better with this.” He talked about three Google projects that aim to solve the connectivity problem: